MANILA, Philippines — (UPDATE – 11:55 a.m.) Communist rebels in the Southern Tagalog said mothers in the New People’s Army leave their children behind for the same reasons overseas Filipino workers do — to build a better future for their offspring.

“Ang pag–iiwan sa mga anak ay hindi sa pagiging iresponsableng magulang kundi sa hindi maiiwasang sitwasyon dahil sa kalagayan ng bansa — ang karalitaan at kahirapan (Leaving the children is not because one is an irresponsible parent but because of the inescapable condition of the country — poverty and misery),” Jaime “Ka Diego” Padilla, spokesman of the NPA’s Melito Glor Command, said in a statement.

Padilla was responding to President Rodrigo Duterte’s attempt to explain a recent comment for which he received widespread criticism, that soldiers should not kill female rebels but shoot them in their vaginas to render these “useless.”

The rebel spokesman had earlier warned that Duterte’s remark “gives further license to military, police and paramilitaries to conduct heinous crimes and sexual violations against militant Filipino women in the countryside in an attempt to suppress their revolutionary sentiments.”

Monday, news reports quoted Duterte as saying at the opening of a shooting range in Davao that the comment, which he made to more than 200 former rebels in Malacañang was meant to be “sarcasm” and came from a rebuke he said he made to a rebel couple who saw their grown up son when they surrendered after many years of separation.